On the page, Damian Barr’s 2013 memoir is subtle and seductive. His coming-of-age tale is like a Scottish version of The End of Eddy by the French novelist Édouard Louis; two first-person accounts of growing up gay and working-class in the declining industrial hinterlands of the late 20th century. Both authors present themselves as bright and sensitive, ill equipped to deal with the domestic violence, homophobia and bullying that besets them.
Just as Louis understands his life in terms of political choices, Barr sees an equivalence between the end of steel-making at Ravenscraig in North Lanarkshire, the iniquities of the government’s homophobic section 28 legislation and the messianic individualism of prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Each is an expression of cruelty.
